NYT: Grade inflation higher at private colleges

Last week, the New York Times’ Economix blog posted about some interesting research on grade inflation and its effect on the job market and grad school acceptance. The post was accompanied by a nice graphic showing the evolution of grade inflation over time.

For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s,  grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.

In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more. The chart below shows average G.P.A.’s from 1930 to 2006. Gray dots represent individual schools’ average G.P.A’s. The blue and green lines represent the average G.P.A. for each school type — public or private — over time:

Gray dots on their graph represent individual data points, and colored lines indicate aggregated trends.

(Click to view full size.)

The Times continues, “The authors [of the report] suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students’ especially inflated grades.”

Click here to read the full post from the New York Times.